For many years following the conclusion of the Presidential campaign key staffers from each candidate have sat down at Harvard and discussed, for the benefit of History, what their experiences were like during the campaign. What were the greatest highs and the darkest lows, but this year when that was attempted between Clinton and Trump staffers rather than gaining some insight and historical perspective Harvard students and staff were treated to a pitched cat fight between staffers over the tenor and tone of the campaign, and specifically whether Donald Trump won the Presidency by appealing to White Supremacy.
“I would rather lose than win the way you guys did!” said Palmieri, the communications director for Hillary for America to the Trump team
“How exactly did we win, Jenn? How exactly?” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway snipped back. “I have a smile on my face at all times.”
Palmieri called out the Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon and his former employer Breitbart News a vehicle for emboldening America’s “white supremacists and white nationalists.”
As you would expect the Trumpster reacted rather badly to that. Really badly.
Watching the reaction to this on MSNBC add some needed perspective because it included Nicole Wallace who was on the winning side of one of these get togethers with George W. Bush in 2004 and the losing side the John McCain in 2008.
Anyway, as expected Kellyanne was predictably defensive and highly “offended” by the suggestion that the Trump campaign crossed a line of decency by deliberately and directly courting White Supremacists.
“Are you gonna look me in the face and say I ran a campaign that was a platform for white supremacists?” Conway snapped.
Palmieri basically said she was.
“Are you kidding me?” Conway asked.
“You guys are punching down, this is unbelievable,” Trump’s deputy campaign manager David Bossie shouted.
Clinton spokeswoman Karen Finney agreed, saying, “part of what Donald Trump did in this campaign was to mainstream the alt-right.”
Conway told the Clinton staffers, “You guys are bitter. We are being very gracious. You’re bitter.”
No, she was not kidding. Not even a little bit. Palmieri went on to say one of her proudest moments in the campaign was specifically when Hillary Clinton documented Trump’s veiled and semi-veiled racial arson point by point.
Everywhere I go, people tell me how concerned they are by the divisive rhetoric coming from my opponent in this election.
It’s like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for President of the United States.
From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.
He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.
His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous.
In just the past week, under the guise of “outreach” to African Americans, Trump has stood up in front of largely white audiences and described black communities in insulting and ignorant terms:
“Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing. No homes. No ownership.
Crime at levels nobody has seen… Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
Those are his words.
Donald Trump misses so much.
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When Trump was getting his start in business, he was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black and Latino tenants.
Their applications would be marked with a “C” – “C” for “colored” – and then rejected.
Three years later, the Justice Department took Trump back to court because he hadn’t changed.
The pattern continued through the decades.
State regulators fined one of Trump’s casinos for repeatedly removing black dealers from the floor. No wonder the turn-over rate for his minority employees was way above average.
And let’s not forget Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called “Birthers.”
He promoted the racist lie that President Obama isn’t really an American citizen – part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black President.
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Even the Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, described that as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
To this day, he’s never apologized to Judge Curiel.
But for Trump, that’s just par for the course.
This is someone who retweets white supremacists online, like the user who goes by the name “white-genocide-TM.” Trump took this fringe bigot with a few dozen followers and spread his message to 11 million people.
His campaign famously posted an anti-Semitic image – a Star of David imposed over a sea of dollar bills – that first appeared on a white supremacist website.
The Trump campaign also selected a prominent white nationalist leader as a delegate in California. They only dropped him under pressure.
When asked in a nationally televised interview whether he would disavow the support of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump wouldn’t do it. Only later, again under mounting pressure, did he backtrack.
Bitterness is to be expected. No, the Clinton campaign never thought that a man who traffics in this type of rhetoric could ever gain enough support to actually become President, they believed that America actually was post-Racial in the age of Obama, but it. is. not. If anything Trump was exactly a backlash against the post-racialism of Obama. They were wrong about that and couldn’t conceive that anyone who says things like this, or has such a long history of bigotry, would be able to have all of that ignored, rationalize and even justified by a broad swath of the American public.
Their basic point: that Trump exploited white racial resentment is demonstrably true — it’s a matter of facts— particularly if actually pay attention to what white supremacist have to say about it.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory and the recent rise of the white nationalist “alt-right,” a 150-year-old racist group has been spreading its wings: the Ku Klux Klan, which on Saturday is planning its first post-election rally.
“Our membership grows by the day,” said Gary Munker, who identifies himself as a spokesman for the group. The Klan, since its creation in 1866, has called for a white and Christian America; historically, it has resorted to lynchings and racial violence as the means to its end.
Like the former KKK leader David Duke, who supported Trump’s candidacy — and was eventually disavowed by the New York billionaire — Munker says he was drawn by the Republican candidate’s language, particularly his attacks against immigrants and his talk of deporting millions.
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Klan membership is no more than 6,000 today, he noted, compared to 40,000 in the 1960s and several million in the 1920s.
Still, proponents of white superiority feel that Trump’s election has given them “a political space to present their views as legitimate,” Potok said, adding that “they have not been taken that seriously in 50 years.”
Now the Trumpsters argument that the Clinton campaign failed to find a message for the white working class in the rust belt may also be valid. Part of the problem there is that the challenges are not just the issue of globalization, but also automation and advancing technologies that have taken away the industrial base of many of these states and the honest truth is that no form of bashing foreigners and immigrants will bring back jobs from an industrial age that has essentially passed these people by.
Clinton and Democrats don’t have any easy answers to the problem these Americans face because there aren’t any good simple answers to that problem.
In short, Donald Trump won by lying to them. He promised them something that simply can’t be accomplished in the way he suggested. It’s simply not possible.
Some of those workers say they were responding in part to Trump’s repeated bashing of trade, and at the same time perceived Hillary Clinton as a poster child for the free-trade deals that her husband signed and President Obama tried to push through Congress.
“A lot of our members equated NAFTA to Hillary and Bill Clinton,” said Donnie Blatt, a coordinator with the United Steelworkers union in Ohio. “A lot of our members felt like they hated Hillary Clinton, they believed she caused the loss of all their jobs.”
But it will be almost impossible for Trump to fulfill his promise to bring back most of the assembly line gigs lost to globalization, economists say. The U.S. has moved toward advanced manufacturing, which employs highly educated people, and plants that once required manual labor are now manned by robots that work faster than people and cost less. U.S. factories are producing more than ever, with far fewer employees.
And further via economist at MIT.
Pundits will debate the wellsprings of Donald Trump's election triumph for years. Right now, cultural explanations are in the lead. Multiple researchers and journalists are stressing the role of “racial resentments” and xenophobia as the deepest sources of Trump’s appeal. And such explanations cannot be dismissed.
But the decades-long decline of U.S. manufacturing employment and the highly automated nature of the sector’s recent revitalization should also be high on the list of explanations. The former is an unmistakable source of the working-class rage that helped get Trump elected. The latter is the main reason Trump won’t be able to “make America great again” by bringing back production jobs.
In all truth both the Trump campaigners and the Clinton campaigners had a valid point. Yes, the Clinton campaign underestimated and failed to speak to rust belt angst and frustration, even though the Obama Administration focus on retraining and retooling skills has been making strides and has brought back over 800,000 U.S. Manufacturing jobs since 2010, it hasn’t been felt yet by millions of others that were lost previously, and also there is a deep resentment of others and minorities who many working class whites feel were gaining benefits under Obama that left them behind.
These two issues are actually intertwined and overlap. The white working class was suckered into believe Trump’s false economic promises while ignoring and giving a pass to all of his immigrant and minority bashing. By failing to stand-up firmly and unequivocally to racism — they gave tacit approval for it. It doesn't matter whether each and every one of them is or was racist, they chose to give a bright Green Light to racism. They may ignore it, deny it, not fully realize it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
And Trump’s little “Stop It” statements, his claims to “Disavow” racism and even his “We condemn hate and bigotry” statements from the first stop in his “Fuck You, I Won anyway” Tour all come off as half-hearted and forced while his attacks on Mexicans, Muslims and other minorities sound like exactly what he truly believes. He shows more legitimate anger toward the cast of Hamilton and Saturday Night Live than he does to the alt-Nazis and the KKK. In order to get the whites on his side, Trump did grant a safe space to the Deplorables.
In the end they are not going to get what they were promised, not even close, meanwhile the minorities whom they sold out for their own personal gain are also going to get the shaft with increased levels of hate crimes, the continued crippling of the voting rights act, a total failure on criminal justice reform and even more discriminatory and bigoted policies that will do nothing more than increase racial resentment and strife.
The Trumpeters attempt to blow this off, but the Southern Poverty Law Center has recorded over 800 incidents of racial harassment since the election of Trump.
People have experienced harassment at school, at work, at home, on the street, in public transportation, in their cars, in grocery stores and other places of business, and in their houses of worship. They most often have received messages of hate and intolerance through graffiti and verbal harassment, although a small number also have reported violent physical interactions. Some incidents were directed at the Trump campaign or his supporters.
Of course, hate crimes and lower-level incidents of racial or ethnically charged harassment have long been common in the United States. But the targets of post-election hate incidents report that they are experiencing something quite new.
“I have experienced discrimination in my life, but never in such a public and unashamed manner,” an Asian-American woman reported after a man told her to “go home” as she left an Oakland train station. Likewise, a black resident whose apartment was vandalized with the phrase “911 nigger” reported that he had “never witnessed anything like this.” A Los Angeles woman, who encountered a man who told her he was “Gonna beat [her] pussy,” stated that she was in this neighborhood “all the time and never experienced this type of language before.” Not far away in Sunnyvale, California, a transgender person reported being targeted with homophobic slurs at a bar where “I’ve been a regular customer for 3 years — never had any issues.”
This is no joke, this is not someone whining or “playing the race card.” This is hate rising.
There’s no real way it turns out well, and I strongly suspect the bitter acrimony we say between the campaigns will also continue for the next several months and years between whites who supported Trump and all the rest of us.